What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[AmateisGal]

Adventures of Don Juan with Errol Flynn - I actually laughed out loud a lot. Fun movie.

North By Northwest since it was on TCM!

 

[Bushman]

"49th Parallel" - a drama/suspense about 6 guys from a destroyed U-boat trying to take over Canada.

Wait... Why are you laughing? This isn't a comedy! Okay, so today it's humorous to consider 6 Nazi sailors traveling from Halifax to Vancouver trying to take over Canada, but at its release in 1941, Germany invading British territories were a very real and very scary thought. With Laurence Olivier in his first British wartime propaganda film, the first of many, this movie is surprisingly poetic when you suspend your belief. It's actually quite an interesting tale of humanity vs Nazism, and how sure some Nazis joined because they were hoping to restore a better life, some because they were scared, but some of them truly believed in Hitler's rhetoric and were willing to die to uphold their dear Fuhrer's deranged beliefs about the world. It actually sends a very poignant political message that still rings loudly today.

 

[Doctor Strange]

That's a great film, even if it was instigated as a patriotic rabble-rouser. One of the many great ones from the Powell & Pressburger collaboration, the greatest British filmmakers of the forties. It's not so much about a single U-boat attacking Canada - though that was a legitimate fear - but mainly about the remaining U-boat crew trying to make it through Canada... to the still-neutral-in-1941 USA and escape. Besides its main propaganda message to Canada and the rest of the British Empire, it was also doing its bit to urge the USA the join the war.

Quick notes:

Eric Portman as the lead German is the smartest character in the film. Powell & Pressburger don't reduce the Nazis to the caricatures you expect in a wartime propaganda film, but treat them as crafty, dangerous, respectable foes.

It may be Laurence Olivier's worst performance. His way-too-broad French Canadian accent approaches Basil Rathbone in Captain Blood ("Vill you not sign ze articles... mon cap-ee-tan?") for utter ham. Actually, several of the guest stars in this film who represent the different kinds of Canadians - Leslie Howard, Raymond Massey - give rather broad performances. The Germans are mostly played with more subtle complexity (including a great turn as the Hutterite community leader by Anton Walbrook). Also note the impossibly young Glynis Johns as the teenage girl in the Hutterite community.

It won the Oscar for Best Story and was nominated for two others.

It's not as well-known as later Powell & Pressburger masterpieces like I Know Where I'm Going, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes... but everything they did is worth seeing!

 

[Julian Shellhammer]

From TCM's Noir Alley, The Man Who Cheated Himself (1950) with Lee J. Cobb, Jane Wyatt, and John (Gun Crazy) Dall. Despite its shoe-string budget and casting against type (Wyatt as a femme fatale and Cobb as a leading man), there were numerous suspense-building moments and some light touches in the midst of murder and deceit.

 

[Bushman]

Currently watching the Harry Belafonte movie "Island in the Sun".

 

[2jakes]

The other day:

I’d forgotten how “roomy’ the train compartments used to be!.. I’m 6’3”.

 

[Fading Fast]

The other day:
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I’d forgotten how “roomy’ the train compartments used to be!.. I’m 6’3”.
View attachment 124618

I never get tired of it and have seen it an embarrassing number of times.

Oh, I don't think Grant was worried about the ceiling height of the compartment at that particular moment.

 

[Worf]

Despairing of the "human condition"... I watched an old fave of mine on DVD...

"When Worlds Collide" by George Pal

Great special effects for it's day... Ocean liners stranded in NY long before they did it in subsequent films. Based on a marvelous "Golden Age" sci fi novel of the same name. It's a wonder they've not done this one over. The sequel "After Worlds Collide" is almost as good. Seems Americans weren't the only nation to make it to the new world. And of course they get to fightin'.

Worf

 

[2jakes]

Oh, I don't think Grant was worried about the ceiling height of the compartment at that particular moment.

....and Hitch tastefully left the sexual gymnastics to the viewer's
imagination!

 

[Fading Fast]

"No Down Payment" 1957

Despite the image today of the 1950s being a time of simple, upbeat movies, there were plenty of films made then that show America wasn't a uniformly happy land of increasing prosperity for all. "No Down Payment" goes to the heart of post-war 1950s American opportunity and burgeoning prosperity - a new housing subdivision in sunny California - and loudly and methodically guns down every positive archetype of that prosperity.

Nothing is subtle in this movie and no-one is happy. The surfacey modern 1950s appeal, the nice manners, the pleasant smiles of several young married-and-striving couples in this slightly upscaled-from-Levittown world is portrayed as skin deep covering a broken-down body of anger, anxiety, resentment, unfulfilled dreams, frustrated sexuality, class resentment, racism, alcoholism, rape (it's a brutal scene with brutal consequences) and domestic abuse. The seemingly almost-always-on-and-too-loud living-room TV mesmerizing the kids with Westerns or cops-and-robbers shows - while drowning out their parents' thoughts - serves as a disparaging leitmotif while also throwing a hard uppercut to 1950s consumerism.

If this was the only America in the 1950s, even this Capitalist Libertarian would have considered signing up for a long stay in the Soviet Union, which might have been the point as one of the writers was a victim of the blacklisting of that era that required his screenplay to be credited to another writer. But fair is fair, an author that should have had the freedom to publicly share his work, would be the logical one to scream "it's all rot."

Taking the movie on its own terms - since this is not the venue to fight out the good and bad of the 1950s - its soap-opera style, TV-production-quality feel, average acting and, as noted, in-your-face story telling results in a very obvious ball of anger and resentment. Every marriage is broken from alcoholism or infidelity or money problems (several versions of this one are here: pushy "I want more" wife / failure-dreamer husband, etc.) or class insecurity and it is all shown again and again with stilted dialogue that reflects the ideas, however, not how real people talk.

But its heavy-handedness is effective. The thin veneer of 1950s pretty - nice cars, homes, appliances, clothes, manners - serves as a powerfully contrasting backdrop emphasizing all the broken families and lives that are highlighted by speech after speech (hardly masquerading as dialogue) about the emptiness of conformity, consumerism and easy financing (hence, the descriptive and metaphorical title - these lives have no down payment of character or honesty).

I'm glad I saw it as it works the same way a megaphone works when it has something important to say. You can’t miss the message and can decide if you buy it whole or see it - as I do - as one part of a complex picture that was neither all utopia nor dystopia.

And a shout-out is due to Joanne Woodward's performance - the only actor in it (along with Pat Hingle) who has the presence to fill a movie screen and the acting chops to make forced dialogue feel real.


N.B., I can't believe there is any chance at all that Lizzie wouldn't like this movie - it eviscerates the Boys from Marketing. Lizzie, have you seen it?

 

[LizzieMaine]

I haven't, but now that you've brought it to my attention I'm going to seek it out! There were a lot of rebellious thinkers in the late 1950s who had choked on the U Auto Buy Now kool-aid and were lighting the fuse that touched off the 1960s. The year before this film came out, muckraking journalist John Keats released a highly provocative book called "The Crack In The Picture Window," which I have to think had been read and absorbed by the screenwriters of this picture.

 

[2jakes]

TCM today!

The sign for the Golden Gate is shown in the opening to the movie.

The actual bridge displayed is the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

 

[2jakes]

Maltese Falcon ~ crime scene of Miles Archer:

A movie poster for another Bogie movie, “Swing Your Lady” (1938), can be seen in
background.

 

[2jakes]

Earlier in the film Sam Spade walks past a poster for the non-existent movie
"The Girl From Albany” this is a joke aimed at Warner Bros. Who had wanted
to use the name "The Gent From Frisco” instead of the Maltese Falcon’.

 

[2jakes]

Another Warner Bros. “pop-up”!

Later, after his encounter with Cairo, Spade leaves his office in the Commercial Building, in the background behind him is the Bailey Theatre marquee, playing The Great Lie (1941) Bette Davis, Mary Astor and George Brent.

 

[2jakes]

 

[Zombie_61]

TCM today!
View attachment 124784

My wife and I watched The Maltese Falcon today too. Far better than more reruns of The Andy Griffith Show.

 

[Touchofevil]

My wife and I watched The Maltese Falcon today too. Far better than more reruns of The Andy Griffith Show.

Although, reruns of The Andy Griffith Show are pretty good to me a little variety is nice.

 

[2jakes]

I enjoy The Maltese Falcon and The Andy Griffith Show.
Each are in a league of their own.

 

[Fading Fast]

I haven't, but now that you've brought it to my attention I'm going to seek it out! There were a lot of rebellious thinkers in the late 1950s who had choked on the U Auto Buy Now kool-aid and were lighting the fuse that touched off the 1960s. The year before this film came out, muckraking journalist John Keats released a highly provocative book called "The Crack In The Picture Window," which I have to think had been read and absorbed by the screenwriters of this picture.

It was a "premiere" on TCM, so it hasn't been on that channel before. Finding new-to-me old movies like "No Down Payment" are a home-run moment. Sure, I love seeing "Casablanca" or "Swing Time" again - and, every year, I still catch several old movies that I haven't seen before, but most of those are B movies the studios made just to fill the schedule. It isn't that often anymore that an A picture like "No Down Payment," that I haven't seen before, pops up.

Despite its many flaws, it is, IMHO, an important movie that captures a moment in America and presents a view (a strident and tendentious one) that says a lot about the time, and, as you note, the times to come. I'm going to re-watch it this weekend (I kept it on my DVR). I'll keep my eye out for it and will let you know if I see that TCM is running it again. I know you would enjoy it and I'd enjoy hearing your thoughts on it.